Thursday, 25 February 2016

Streets Ahead is the column
from London Walks' Pen & Daily Constitutional Special Correspondent David
Tucker…

London Walks Guides aren’t just guides (let
alone pretty faces).

Richard III, for example, is an actor and
playwright. His new play, Whistleblower – it's on at the Waterloo East Theatre – has
been nominated for two Offie Awards!

The play's about – this hardly needs saying
– Edward Snowden.

When I saw it, it was "in
stereo". In stereo because for 30 years now I've been haunted by a
passage in Shelby Foote's History of the American Civil War. And thinking about
Snowden – and Chelsea Manning – in relation to President Abraham Lincoln, well,
plus ça change...

Here's the passage.

"In late April, for security reasons,
he [Lincoln] authorised simultaneous raids on every telegraph office in the
northern states, seizing the originals and copies of all telegrams sent or
received during the past year. As a result of this and other measures,
sometimes on no stronger evidence than the suspicions of an informer nuring a
grudge, men were taken from their homes in the dead of night, thrown into
dungeons, and held withoug explanation or communication with the outside world.
Writs of habeus corpus were denied, including those issued by the Supreme Court
of the United States. By the same authority, or in the absences of it, he took
millions from the treasury and handed them to private individuals, instructed
them to act as purchasing agents for procuring the implements of war at home
and abroad....Congress bowed its head and agreed. Though Amerians grew pale in
prison cells without knowing the charges under which they had been snatched
from their homes or places of employment, there were guilty men among the
innocent, and a dungeon was as good a place as any for a patriot to serve his
country through a time of strain."

Chilling isn't it. And adamantine hard.
That phrase, "Americans grew pale in prison cells..." is the stuff of
nightmares. And not just Americans of course – anybody. Welcome – have we ever
left it, will we ever leave it? – to Kafka country, to the landscape, internal
and external, of Might Makes Right.